LUCAS: Drought threatening to start hurting groceries -- and bourbon

EVANSVILLE - The rains have come — finally — and in abundance. Perhaps too abundantly if you ask those people whose vehicles stalled out Thursday night in the flooded Virginia Street viaduct and on some waterlogged streets on Evansville's West Side.

That raises the question why anyone, regardless of what size SUV they have, would attempt to drive through the Virginia Street viaduct any time rain is falling harder than a light drizzle.

An exasperated firefighter exclaimed on the airwaves Thursday, "The fools keep driving around our truck and then expect us to come pull them out when they drown out."

Maybe it was sort of like snow; it had been so long since it had rained that people had forgotten how to drive in it.

Regardless, despite the rain, described by the National Weather Service as a record amount for an Aug. 2 in Evansville, the drought is not broken. The region remains extremely dry, and the rains fell too late to help most crops.

Corn has done all it's going to do. The twisted stalks and shriveled ears are not going to rejuvenate. Some soybeans will benefit from the moisture, but some fields have already started yellowing and drying down. Like the corn, those plants won't come back.

A couple of things this past week drove the seriousness of the drought home to me.

For the first time in my life, I saw farmers in Western Kentucky cutting and baling cornstalks to use for animal feed this winter. I have occasionally seen people bale the stalks after the grain is harvested, but this was an effort to salvage something from an otherwise ruined crop.

The other was an email note from a friend noting the long-term impact of the drought on food stocks and their costs and suggesting that we should be stocking up on corn-based breakfast cereal.

Actually, the effect of the drought, which has affected most of the Corn Belt, on food costs will be much broader than just raising the cost of already overpriced breakfast cereals. Corn finds its way into a significant number of products we consume from the chips we enjoy at Mexican restaurants to a number of the items found in snack machines. And in many products, high fructose corn syrup remains the sweetener of choice.

When you consider, too, that corn is a major animal feed, any shortage and increased price for the commodity will be felt throughout the food chain. Corn-based feeds grow the chickens we eat, fatten the cattle and produce the protein needed for cows to produce the milk that we drink and add to many of the recipes for other products.

As with oil, the increased cost of raw grains — corn, soybeans and others — will eventually work their way into the markets.

And the effect of the drought is exacerbated by the diversion of a significant amount of corn to produce ethanol as an additive to gasoline.

And that realization really got me to thinking. This drought is going to affect Kentucky's bourbon industry.

It's not called corn whiskey for nothing, and if there's a shortage of corn, the price will go up and supplies may be in jeopardy.